


Drifters

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Swearing, Timey-Wimey, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 01:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I would not ask you to protect her, because I know you can't bend time for her. And I would not ask you not to hurt her because I know you already have. But you can love her now.”</p><p>Of course, River and Jack knew each other. They looked after each other and killed each other in equal measures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Inkfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkfire/gifts).



> For Azzie, because she wanted me to edit this old thing.
> 
> This is a multi-chapter work, which is to be taken as a series of short stories involving Jack and River, and their friendship.  
> There will be a lot of different ships involved, including every combination possible of Eleven/River/Jack/Nine/Rose/Ten -minus Nine/Ten/Eleven obviously. The rating might go up in a chapter or two. I repeat, this is a collection of character studies and adventures rather a full finished story; this implies I do not intend to put an end to this story.

He met many of them, these damn River Songs.

In the 51st century, naturally, he runs into the batty archaeology student who has a special talent for finding trouble. Their first encounter is a bit of a sleeper, compared with what they went through afterwards.

As a time agent, he loses touch, but it is a near impossible task not to know about her who has no regard for paradoxes and little for historical figures, popping up in the wrong places and times, disrupting revolutions and bedding leaders. She once threw a legendary party on top of the pyramids –the three of them, linked via a rather ingenious pulley and hand-gliding system- with Tallulah Bankhead, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter O’Toole, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saint Augustin, Françoise Sagan and Léa de Lonval as guests. The Time Agency demonstrated its discontent in ways Jack thought as impossible as the woman.

It is during his time as a con-man that he truly gets to know her; when it comes to stealing and creating havoc, she is the best of partners in crime, even if she prefers to play it maverick. By that time, she is in prison, rather out of it. She is a bad one, who knows just how bad and has stitches to prove just how far she goes to conceal it. She has genocides ciphered as lifelines, but keeps her fists clenched hard until her nails rewrite them. She has elbows like corkscrews and teeth like bullets. She fights like a fury and tricks like a siren. And tasted like John when he kissed her, before fainting, before being abducted. But the part where they hijacked a star-liner and prevented a trans-galactic agreement that would empower Earth antiques-smugglers was worth it. He got to keep and re-sell some of the pieces even.

Were he still a time agent or in possession of some sort of authority, he would lock her up; the woman is a walking hazard, properly insane. But in this business of running and surviving, who is not?

She trusts him since a bruising incident in the Tate Modern Classic Gallery; he trusts her since she killed him and waited for him to come back.

Later, when he meets the Doctor and is forced to take the long road, he becomes her friend, or rather, she becomes his, preventing him from running into himself quite a few times, because, well, he can’t remember everything. She is where the Doctor isn't. She knows everything about him, and he knows only fragments from the thick dossier the Agency and Torchwood have on her.

He is grateful for the imbalance in their knowledge of one another; he would have only one shot at killing her. And even then, he suspects he is not the one with the privilege to. There is only one man he knows, capable of leaving her with holes in the face, each time, where there used to be dimples – _wrinkles_ , he thinks, but she is not supposed to get them- and in the hearts, more and more often. _He_ will be the one to finish River.

She never needs to tell him anything. Some things he guessed, some things he deduced about her. They pray rather than talk together. Live and full praying though, with laughter and liquors and guns. And sex too much. And life so fast they have to retire from one another after a day. They celebrate the Doctor, Ianto, Steven, the living and the dead all alike. Because he died once and never recovered since, and because she lost eternity by chance, they consider each other altars of life and death, the timed woman and the fixed man.

Sometimes she is clear to read and he wonders how the Doctor can bear her face not-face-anymore. Open book. She needs the diary to let the Doctor believe her secrets are there rather than on her face. She let Jack drew a sketch of her in the nude, once. Because she needed it.

That is the kind of state she is in sometimes. She usually reciprocates.

They are a sheet of paper, he thinks. She is the flat, he is the edge. Time tears them; she diminishes, he multiplies. A single sheet though ad they hold to each other. And they love the same pen that both writes and scratches them. The vacancy of heart she displays at times is the one he felt when he was left behind on Satellite Five, by the Doctor’s  and Rose’s eagerness. The exhaustion too.  Because the vacancy works in cycle and they occupy each other’s loneliness like heroes descending into Inferno.

Even so, it took time to learn anything about her, from her mouth, from her toes. Consummate liar, she developed a series of aliases as real as her kisses. He guessed after their third night together they are who she fantasised to become if she had held longer on her regenerations.

Lover different each night. And to the Doctor, she would only show River Song.

He has a name for each of them. And River doesn’t even know his real name. Only knows –and loves- him by his sole alias.

She is remarkably linear with him, always drops on him at the most unexpected moments. He does not always welcome her, but always says goodbye with an invitation to come whenever she wants. They are anchors to each other, default safe locations, refuges, even if they have sometimes a hard time finding each other, beneath the layers and layers of adventures –and stealing. He even encounters mad Mels once. He isn’t sure she remembers;

her memory is worse than his.

One morning, he woke up in one of his beds and could not remember the last time he saw her. That’s when he realised River was dead.


	2. Pre-Pyrrhus.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She was going to dodge, at any moment. The taming of River Song required patience. It could well be the ultimate reason of his being stranded here. Learning patience. "
> 
> The minute he understood she was taming him, she was already gone.

“Hello, beloved casualty,” he greeted, sorry.

“Hullo, handsome collateral damage” she smiled, assured.

 She lifted her nose to him and inquired: “Fancy mulled wine?”

River and Jack sat, undisturbed by the ever-tapping rain, in the middle of the boneless time-worn sofa. The air was fresh, colourless in the clear, empty warehouse. His soaked coat was dripping on the concrete, flung across the arm of the settee. Cardiff had been washed, nothing unusual here, but this time the rain came with River in its clouds. The bottle of thermos stood between them, opened by River’s hand, sweet and hot vapours steaming out, rings on her fingers, slipping up, one by one.

He fetched a cup on the floor, poured the amber liquid and inhaled the spicy fumes. Wistfully, gently, he relaxed his aching back, entrusting it to the sofa and River. She looked like a big, fuzzy cat, so loosely enrobed in what seemed like a poncho or an over-large scarf he could have mistaken her for a cushion. Her face was a picture of rebellion about to break out. Prickled, touchy, brisk. He would have to work around her.

He knew how to.

“Is it German?” he casually asked. “I seem to recall something like that in Germany”, he snorted. “ _Long_ time ago.”

“Could be.” The cup went to her face and her eyes followed briefly the curve. “I picked it up in France, during la Belle Époque. It was near the German frontier.”

He smirked, at the thought of her in one of the glorious, gorgeous, tiny-waisted dresses from the turn of the century. On his knees sometimes, he would plead for a ride in the past, in the future; anywhere out of this place, but she had persisted. Following the Doctor’s orders? Her own rules?  There were already too many specimens of him prancing about in the twentieth century. She would not risk an encounter.

He could not hop back there, in the smelly and muddy streets his feet ran, in the little cafés he used to haunt, a blonde on the arm. To him, it was yesterday. The books he read, the engravings he caressed were pithy renderings of what his life was, however long, his habits and boredoms. For now lost. _There must be a reason_ , he repeated to himself.  Or there will be.

He shook himself out of his thoughts, drowning his nostalgia in the sweet beverage. It tasted like Germany and past, opulence and joie-de-vivre. Large dresses, buckled boots, Christmas, calendars, other perfumes, other women and men. But severed.

“Did they have those dresses, you know,” he deflected. “In Germany?”

She pulled her feet under herself, then curled up between the sloppy cushions. She knew what he was thinking about. The past was her playground.

“Actually, I did not run around in those circles. It was all very undercover and secret, and quite gruesome and illegal.” She squirmed her face, all playful wrinkles. The vapours from the cup had condensed under the tip of her nose, mirroring the red sheen of the wine. “Quite gender-bending too.”

He let himself laugh; the thought of her in a masculine vagrant suit was too improbable to fit even their lifestyle. There was not one universe in which she could conceal her womanhood. Though he seemed to recall other times, when she would fly rather than run, across worlds of dreams and chaos, guided by sweet-scented hypnotic lips.

“Do you think about it, sometimes?” She added, and he looked back at her hands, the patterns she was following on her poncho/scarf attempts at loops, despite the linear fabric. Detour and twisted routes to piece together a spiral.

He blanked, afraid to consider what 'it' is – her 'it’s were never a-chronic, not even ominous, but oh! So heavy. Introspection verged on masochism when he was around to listen to her. Her confessions were closely guarded, rarely dispensed. When she talked, it was like accidentally cracking open the spine of an ancient book. Each time she opened up, he had to fix her.

When she reciprocated in their trading secrets and cracked heart, she ineluctably won. She had the advantage of hallucinogenic lipstick over him. Confession, oblivion. Her creators had taught her well.

“Do you think about them being all at once always alive, always dead, all of them,” she carried on. “And all of it, here, for ever – the library of Alexandria, the last days of the Earth, the watery desert of Loon Cimiel, the trees of Trion, and the mighty gate of Gondawa III on the fifth satellite of Ganymede. Do you think about it?”

A young River then. Quite even: an older River would not ask about the state of his heart.

It was uncanny, this question, in the silence of this bare, grey, cool warehouse, so human and impermanent. Another place for him to mourn in a thousand years. And to have the question asked by her, who he knew was far more experienced in time-travel than him. Yet she was mortal, he was not any more.

He knew for a fact she didn't care about dying; living to the full only mattered. She was initially the nearly immortal one and had those bouts of questioning which unsettled him. He could not afford to stop and ponder.

Time passing would keep him quiet in his attempts to voice any concern. He did not the feel the Universe the way the Doctor did. River could.

He crossed his legs, emptied his cup and put it on the arm of the sofa, seeking balance for a second before turning to her and folding his hands in his lap.

“Well, I'm not into archaeology, whatever you say.” He pushed his back into the seat, his shirt revealing a strip of skin that grazed uncomfortably against the rough fabric. “I don't wake up crying at night upset over some lost scrolls. I acknowledge their importance all the same.”

She was eyeing him intently, as if genuinely intrigued by his state of mind. Old River, young River? He should start a spotter’s guide.

 _Comfort_ , he thought, she was searching. And something else. Something she had experienced but could not voice. She was hoping to find it here, in his words, in his stranded waiting in Cardiff.

Plucking Jack? That was new.

“I know what you mean. But I remember I'm human, I live quite completely in the present. It preserves me. I am relieved to see the past buried, so that something may be built upon it. And I settle on that. I don't think of them dead fifty years in the future, even if I know that those fifty years in the future with them dead and me alive will be. I will witness it.”

_He did._

She combed back her hair, unconvincingly and he picked at the sole of his leather shoe, waiting. He dislodged a pebble from there and she stopped rummaging through her hair. She was right where he needed her to be.

“That's why I am so perverted. Far worse than an anomaly. I will outlive life itself, maybe the end of the Universe. Maybe I have always been part of the fabric of time and he didn’t know.” He hunched his shoulders, chest shallow and she made a gesture toward him. Not exactly reaching. “An undetected original flaw,” he smiled. “That's why he doesn't want to see me anymore.”

Her hands dropped in the space between them and he became aware of how close she had been to touch him, without doing so. Something was keeping her. He may not have the patience to wait for her to talk this time.

“I will certainly not let him dump me that way,” she half-joked.

He lifted an eyebrow and huffed, in mock disdain.

“You’re a paradox, forbidden, _enticing._ ” He added a little flourish of the hand before lifting his chin.  “Plus, you are entirely his responsibility. You screwed up each other's life so much I'm not even sure, would he want it, he could untangle the whole entanglement that your lives are.”

 _He_ just shot straight through the Doctor’s life, leaving a crater that shelved the rim around, forever. The Doctor would not look back to him, not chase him across the galaxies, simply hang his head in shame and let the Universe grow old around them, apart.

“Paradoxes are fragile things, so easily disturbed,” she mused. “He could so easily undo me. He showed more ruthlessness on lesser criminals.”

He braced the cup, uneasy. He would not go there and she knew it. Not a battle in grievances or pain. Not here.

She shrugged in understanding.

“Still, I’ve got to be the longest running piece of ephemera in the history of time.”

“Don't get too big for your britches. At least you can die,” he dryly cued.

Her throw-back line fell flat on the concrete. She blinked, expressionless.

_Did River still understand death? Was River looking forward to death?_

And he stiffened at the thought she was definitely getting somewhere with this. Her pride had led her astray, and she was struggling to get back to the topic she had not reached yet. This was not a social call, in which she indulged, contrary to the Doctor.

“I've always thought you got the worse of him,” she finally murmured.

He gingerly ducked to retrieve the thermos and re-fill his cup. The tin cup spit him back a drop of hot liquid, purple dot on his hand. River was nestling an empty cup in her hands on top of her bent knees as if offering the absence of content to the brisk air. When he shook the bottle to suggest more wine, she did not answer, instead resumed her thoughts, absent.

“I mean, he has been arrogant, careless, unkind, impatient, rude, cold, time lord victorious to his friends, but you,” she paused, her eyes so coolly studying him he felt the urge to terrify her. Bring violently his face close to her and scream ‘boo’. “You, he plainly abandoned out of fear. Couldn't face you.”

Over a cup of sweet wine, they were finding word by word an antidote to a poison she would not disclose. How very her. Her mind, he could understand, her loneliness too, but this was entirely different. She was waiting for him to catch on a shifting.

“You're talking about yourself, aren't you?” His eyes slid to her, askance. “You are afraid he will let you down in the future.”

“Who doesn't?” She looked down at her cup. “In the end, he leaves us all. He already is, in a way, leaving us.” A smile drew her lips and she stared at him. “Time travel.”

“Selfish,” he conceded, lowering his chin on his chest and severing the contact. “He is as much as we are. But _we_ could spare him that.”

She suddenly moved her whole body forward, limbs emerging from the large fabric and rolling around until she was bent over the ground and put the cup down. He wondered where she had picked up such chaotic gestures.

“Why would I spare him?” She brazenly asked, toppling back in the sofa. Her eyes went to him, straight. She was not teasing. “Don’t throw one of his lines about indomitable, resilient humans, please.”

He pinched his lips, refusing to counter her in what seemed another attempt to side-track the conversation.

“I'm selfish and not that human anymore, remember? And God, I _wan_ t him. I would spare him _to have him._ I would also chase him across the galaxies, I have all the time in the world for that. But he doesn’t want me, I oblige. You”, he frowned, setting his jaw.

She was going to dodge, at any moment. The taming of River Song required patience. It could well be the ultimate reason of his being stranded here. Learning patience. He sighed before continuing.

“You chose to be alone, you could stay with him.”

“Not again,” she growled and heaved an annoyed sigh. River had silent sighs, always. All shoulders and eyes. She would not breathe a breath out of place. “We would drive each other up the wall.”

“You would love each other up the wall. I would stay, would he take me.”

“You old romantic soul,” she bit. Sincere but raw. He _was_ a romantic; the final consonant clucked in her mouth like the cylinder of a gun. “I already love him that much. I don't need any domestic fantasy on the TARDIS for that.”

He laughed; she remained deadly serious. He once told her she looked like Berlin after the war. She wore sentences like those on her lips, bright red and white, decorations and monuments, but foreign. Pacific occupation.

There was truth in it nevertheless. She could not stand the Doctor on a daily, domestic basis. Not this young at least. He had met older, mellower versions of River whose fear had granted her more leniency. Still in prison, she seemed very intent on dominating people, so great was her fear of being empowered again.

“Is that all there is? And you would know, wouldn't you?”

He tried an inquisitive smile, unsure.

“You know what I mean.” She shook her head. “There's more to life than the people you love, more to life even than the Doctor. And even that is so many other things than the spark between two people.”

“More like an exploding supernova.” Probing darts of teasing.

Her face brightened and she playfully flung a hand before his face.

“Shut up, you black hole.” She laughed, while he grabbed her wrist and pulled her across his lap, where she twisted and turned to face him, lying. Her hands fell on her stomach and she considered him gravely.

She seemed to say that she would not be there for long, that this was something that needed to be stuck in her memories and left there. She was about to leave again, and not take him with her.

He knew what she meant, at last.

“You want to have a life of you own.”

_Even if it’s fucked up. Even she is so unhappy about it she is lying to her friend._

“I don't want to have a life of my own. I just _have_ one. When you've been a pawn from birth to deaths, thrust from one corner to the other and you fall from the chess board, what do you think happen? You bloody fall, you gyrate and you hit the floor, and there's no way anyone can control that.”

And River shushed.

This was her manifesto. There was a beach lost to time, her future, his past, when she did not turn her head to him just before being taken by the storm and he thought she had died on that beach, without saying goodbye. Seeing her afterwards, he punched her, forbidding her to repeat the disappearing act. She had calmly punched him back and answered she would never have to justify going away, that she would come back, always but she would never ask forgiveness for going.

“So, that's it. You're gyrating away from him,” he brought a hand to her hair, her treasured mane that got them arrested on five different planets when they were still smuggling wigs. And he captured in his fist as many curls as he could.

“From the Silence, the Church, my parents.” She was not pulling away, not moving, not even averting her eyes. “I'm that selfish. I'm gyrating away for no one. This is my turn.”

She had said the Doctor would beg forgiveness, before letting go, and when being caught in the act, would not.  She was not the Doctor. It was her way of making sure the people who wanted to follow her were absolutely sure about it.

“Until you crash,” he concluded.

She had said you would never see her go away when she would really disappear. In the morning, they had taught base-ball to children from the high cities on the same beach.

“Until I crash and I intend to choose that too,” she said, reassured.


End file.
